Chicken and dumplins and a whole lotta laundry

Yesterday I accomplished two main objectives. They each required a huge amount of time.

I made chicken and dumplins from scratch!

And I folded a massive amount of laundry. It took over 3 hours to fold it all. This picture doesn't represent the total amount, just part of the laundry about halfway through the process. The best part of the laundry endeavor was packing away school uniforms for the summer! That, and the fact that I now have clean underwear which is always a good thing.

When I say I made chicken and dumplins from scratch, I seriously mean from scratch. I'm not the chef of the family by any means. I can cook, I just usually don't because I don't have to. My husband is an incredible cook, and anyone who's ever tasted his food will agree. He's seriously such a good cook that I never want to go out to eat on a rare date night because I'd have to go to Commander's Palace in N.O. or somewhere similar in order to not be disappointed and trust me...there is nowhere like that around here. I'd rather eat his food any day of the week! Nonetheless, last winter I embarked on a mission to find the perfect chicken and dumplins recipe. As a child, I remember my great Aunt Rucie's chicken and dumplins. I also remember the adults in my family saying that nobody could make chicken and dumplins like Rucie. So one cold day last winter I was craving chicken and dumplins and decided that I would start searching for C&D recipes that I could play around with until I came up with one on my own. The end result was a combination of a crockpot recipe, my friend Nancy's recipe, and a dumplins recipe from my friend Page who makes the best "grandma food" ever! It's very time-consuming but worth the effort. I will now offer photographic evidence as proof that I really did cook yesterday because anyone who knows me should otherwise rightfully doubt that I did. ha ha ha

Most recipes call for cream of something soup but that stuff has so much sodium I don't really like using it. When I found a crockpot recipe that also had a recipe for a cream of chicken substitute, I copied it and that's what I use.

This is the flour mixture just before I added the ice cold water to form it into dough. I mostly wanted to take this picture because I'm impressed with myself for making anything that required using the pastry wire thingy. :-)

Here are the dumplins just before I dropped them into the boiling chicken...um...stuff. I like symmetry so much that the fact that these dumplins are not all exactly the same size would ordinarily disturb me. Actually, it does bother me a little but because I was trying to do this during the little girls' nap time I wasn't willing to invest any extra time. Plus it's just a little too OCD to worry that your dumplins aren't all the same size.

The pot of boiling chicken and dumplins. It smelled really good!

When you have five kids its rare for everyone to like whats for supper and to eat it all. These are the empty bowls from the oldest 3 and I'm proud to say that they all had seconds.

I didn't attempt to serve this to Dogos. That would've been a disaster waiting to happen. She's currently going through a stage where she likes to put bowls of food upside down on top of her head like a hat so she ate a banana instead. The Boss (the 4 yr old who named me grandma sandy) liked it too and so did my husband, The Chef. After spending all that time I didn't really feel like eating any so I ate leftover birthday food from Peanut's party on Monday night. Does anybody else do that? Spend time cooking something and then you don't want to eat it?